For those, like me, who come from Stoke-on-Trent, it is a sad day. Unless, as is hoped, a buyer can be found, it could be the end of the great pottery manufacturer Wedgwood. And yet the news that Waterford-Wedgwood is going into receivership comes as no surprise. The death-throes of the firm have been long, slow and agonising. In 1908 Arnold Bennett, the great chronicler of the Five Towns of the North Staffordshire Potteries, could write this in the first chapter of his masterpiece, The Old Wives' Tale:

"[The Five Towns] are unique and indispensable because you cannot drink tea out of a teacup without the aid of the Five Towns; because you cannot eat a meal in decency without the aid of the Five Towns. For this the architecture of the Five Towns is an architecture of ovens and chimneys; for this its atmosphere is as black as its mud; for this it burns and smokes all night, so that Longshaw has been compared to hell; for this it is unlearned in the ways of agriculture, never having seen corn except as packing straw and in quartern loaves; for this, on the other hand, it comprehends the mysterious habits of fire and pure, sterile earth; for this it lives crammed together in slippery streets where the housewife must change white window-curtains at least once a fortnight if she wishes to remain respectable; for this it gets up in the mass at six a.m., winter and summer, and goes to bed when the public-houses close; for this it exists--that you may drink tea out of a teacup and toy with a chop on a plate. All the everyday crockery used in the kingdom is made in the Five Towns--all, and much besides."

A century later, and it is as if Bennett were writing about another world. There are few factories belching smoke in Stoke these days. In my childhood in the 1970s and 80s, brick bottle kilns were a distinctive, but vanishing, and, in practical terms, obsolete feature of the Stoke landscape. Stoke still produced an enormous quantity of pottery, but less and less could it accurately be said that "all the everyday crockery used in the kingdom" had been made there. In the immediate postwar British period, it was still going strong: there's a wonderful 1947 public information film about the pottery industry by Terry Bishop called Five Towns, collected in the BFI documentaries box set Land of Promise. In 1978, when I was six, there were still 51,120 members of the ceramic workers' union. But in 2003, when I went back to Stoke to write about the closure of two Wedgwood factories and the loss of 1,000 jobs, there were 12,497. The second part of the 20th century had seen rising labour costs, takeovers by the big players (Wedgwood, Royal Doulton) of the hundreds of smaller operations in the area, and production gradually outsourced to the Far East (with, some would argue, a concomitant reduction in quality). Along with all that, there was a steep diminution in design values. In the 1950s, small but flourishing firms like Midwinter (which was eventually devoured by Wedgwood) had the imagination to employ brilliant designers such as the Burslem-trained genius Jessie Tait and the young Terence Conran. Midwinter's ware was cheerful, gorgeous to look at, handpainted, and affordable (in the early 1950s, my then hard-up parents had Tait's Red Domino, cheap as chips, as their first dinner service). Wedgwood itself, in the 1930s, commissioned the great Eric Ravilious to produce beautiful ware. This sense of imagination and delight seemed to fade away with the loss of the smaller firms and the growth into monoliths of Wedgwood and Doulton. Who has Wedgwood commissioned recently? Kelly Hoppen. No Ravilious she.

A tragedy. Only a few hopeful signs of life remain, in niche firms such as Emma Bridgewater and Burleigh. A great history and a fine tradition is being fast lost.